Private Search Engine

I am more and more interested in privacy. So I am now choosing between two search engines startpage.com and duckduckgo.com Startpage, while advertising as #1, keeps doing just that, drilling in that they totally protect my privacy, while it says that they are "enhanced" by google. So my question is, which one would you personally prefer and why? I like startpage better as it resembles google, but I just don't know.

I'm not sure I understand why you have to choose one or the other, why not use both? From a privacy stand point I think they are about the same. Another one I use often is Ixquick, sister to Start Page. Since each one of the three uses a different search methodology, each will give some what different results from the other two, for the same search term.

Start page is essentially an anonymous google search, probably one reason at least that it resembles google.

What is a core difference between Ixquick and Start Page? From the first glance they both look identical.

Ixquick is a metasearch engine, meaning it uses a compilation gathered from many other search engines where as Start Page just uses google.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ixquick

http://ixquick.com/eng/aboutixquick/

https://www.startpage.com/eng/aboutstartpage/

There's also http://www.googlesharing.net/

It requires you to install a FireFox addon.

Thank you both. But I don't understand, why not use meta search in Start Page? Is it slower? Why not combine both?

Google uses it's own web crawlers and data centers to index billions of web pages. Start Page is designed to return results from a single source, google, excluding all other search engines. A metasearch means to search through multiple sources, in this case multiple search engines.

Using google for this example:

If you were to type autoruns in the search box at google, the results would be links to all over the web. But, if you were to restrict the search to BleepingComputer, type autoruns site:bleepingcomputer.com in the search box, all of the resulting links would lead to BleepingComputer. You are telling google to show you the results from a single web site and to exclude resutls from any other web site.

A "single source search"(Start Page) is pretty much the opposite of a "metasearch"(DuckDuckGo, Ixquick). It would be extremely difficult to have it both ways at the same time.

DuckDuckGo not only shows the results from other search engines, but also pulls info from sources other than search engines as well as using it's own web crawler.

Edit:

If you use Firefox, you should try Didier's suggestion. It could very well be the solution to your dilemma.

I read about googlesharing. I didn't like the reviews. I might try it though. However I do use Ghostery and Disconnect now. Seems to help a lot. I also decided to go with duckduckgo. I feel safer that way. however trying to search for my name on all of them including google, shows google returning a whole a lot more results, although many are not relevant. But duckduckgo seems to do the job. But just in case I got me startpage as well as ixquick.

Thank you. Your knowledge is invaluable.

You're welcome. And the knowledge comes from the internet(a lot of it right here at Bleeping Computer), not me, but thank you.


Happy searching.